Plea to Roku

Last week I was very excited to see a Roku post on Facebook saying that Roku 2 would have captioning, not because I was planning on buying an R2 but because I believed that the software update would surely be available for my XD device. I browsed over to the main website to see if there was perhaps a news item to confirm my belief but i didn’t see one, so I moved over to the support page. While I was scanning the page a chat window popped up and asked if I needed help, so I tried posing my question there. The gist of the whole chat came down to these few lines that I thought made a horrible case for Roku to the detriment of their base customers,

“Dan Osmundson14:07:43
there hasn’t been a software update since i’ve owned my device.
14:09:03
i really believe that there was no intention of releasing one, just the plan to release a new device, Roku 2, with the captions able (and games) software included…

Krish14:09:29
Inorder to avoid the issue with the closed captions, we launched new Roku 2 players.”

I understand that the gaming aspect of the new players requires more horse power but I don’t care about gaming. I was under the impression before getting my XD that captioning was on the horizon as a software update, and there was even a “check for update” feature in the settings menu to confirm this. We bought our Roku because we planned on using it with Netflix and we knew that Netflix has captioning support and both my wife and I are hard of hearing, so captioning would be very useful while watching movies and other content that Roku has available.

And once again, I’ll say I was really excited to see that Roku 2 was supporting captioning because I thought that would mean an update for me too. Your customer support staffer, Krish, confirmed to me that there was a deliberate decision to leave out a lot of customers (Roku 1) who undoubtedly helped make Roku a success.

Since my chat with Krish Roku did release a software update but this has “mysteriously” made my 1st gen XDS behave quite erratically; we are now experiencing frequent device freezing, such that we need to manually disconnect the power to get it to reboot. And when it doesn’t freeze and force us to reboot, it sometimes reboots on its own without any warning. This one and only software update has made things worse!!

Please let your management know that I am excited about what your technology does but that I am quite displeased with the Roku decision to leave ‘many’ customers out of ‘one’ software update that would be greatly appreciated. Please give us captioning!